So! City Magazine is up for two National Magazine Awards. True, they're for photography, but still. We decided to try and figure out why ASME has such a hard-on for them—they were also been nominated for General Excellence in 2002, and Design in 2004, and they won for Photography in 2004—so we looked at their latest issue, which is about travel to places you can't afford, like Patagonia and a fancy train that takes you from Venice to Paris to London, and Sonoma County in California, where you can drink expensive wine. Just like in Sideways!

We mostly ignored the writing (sorry, Josh). Except for that piece by Greg "My Girlfriend Used to Work There" Lindsay about air travel. Cute! We are living in a tarnished age of air travel!

Anyway, we really just wanted to look at all the pretty pictures. Gosh, they really are pretty! Award-worthy! There's a whole travel portfolio called "Life Observed" (we're thinking "Postcolonial Exoticization and Its Discontents" would've been more appropriate, but whatevs). There's this one of a fisherman holding up a really big fish in Madagascar, and a Mongolian herder (of what, we don't know) sipping something out of a cup, and a man's feet in a red mud quarry, and a billboard in Sri Lanka... And a fashion shoot called "Hell's Angels," of women wearing weird, half-robed dresses and black leather flight caps. And another one called "Bollywood Nights," except they used a black model. Maybe they're trying to say that all brown-ish people look the same. Or that we're all the same under the skin. Or under the wallet?